Ruth Jacobsen of Jacobsen & Balla is obsessed with color. She specializes
in creating full-spectrum color wallcoverings by hand.
Full spectrum colors come from paint that has been mixed
using every color in the light spectrum, but in exact, often
minute amounts. The result is a color that not only looks
natural, but seems to glow from within because of the
complete absence of black, just like the colors that occur
in nature.

It all began when Jacobsen needed a wallcovering in
her home that her cat couldn’t scratch and that wouldn’t
stain. An artist who had been fascinated with the
concept of full-spectrum colors for some time, she
created her own wallcoverings using canvas squares and the highest quality
pigments mixed by hand. Applied in pieces like a collage,
Jacobsen’s wallcoverings have expanded into several
different patterns, including “Ming Poems,” featuring
graphite rubbings from a Ming poet on handmade paper with a
hand torn edge; “Venetian Parchment,” a line of rich,
undiluted colors; and “Tiki” a woven fiberglass material
resembling grass cloth.

Jacobsen, who trained as a nurse,
mixes her own colors and measures pigments with syringes to
make accurate measurements down to the half drop. “Accuracy
is of utmost importance in full-spectrum colors,” she says.
The painstaking process yields incredible beauty. Once
you’ve seen her colors, nothing else compares; it’s as if
the rest of the world were black and white.